Monte Carlo burnup code acceleration with the correlated sampling method. Preliminary test on an UOX cell with TRIPOLI-4{sup R}
For several years, Monte Carlo burnup/depletion codes have appeared, which couple a Monte Carlo code to simulate the neutron transport to a deterministic method that computes the medium depletion due to the neutron flux. Solving Boltzmann and Bateman equations in such a way allows to track fine 3 dimensional effects and to get rid of multi-group hypotheses done by deterministic solvers. The counterpart is the prohibitive calculation time due to the time-expensive Monte Carlo solver called at each time step. Therefore, great improvements in term of calculation time could be expected if one could get rid of Monte Carlo transport sequences. For example, it may seem interesting to run an initial Monte Carlo simulation only once, for the first time/burnup step, and then to use the concentration perturbation capability of the Monte Carlo code to replace the other time/burnup steps (the different burnup steps are seen like perturbations of the concentrations of the initial burnup step). This paper presents some advantages and limitations of this technique and preliminary results in terms of speed up and figure of merit. Finally, we will detail different possible calculation scheme based on that method. (authors)